“Wild Son: The Testimony of Christian Brando” Review – A Compelling Performance Of His Story

"Damaged, volatile, darkly handsome, dangerous, dead at 49… and one of the sweetest lost souls I'd ever met.”

Longtime journalist Champ Clark interviewed Marlon Brando’s son Christian, in the years before his untimely death from Pneumonia at age
49. Clark has chronicled their complex friendship in a riveting one-act play, ‘Wild Son: The Testimony of Christian Brando.”

Christian Brando. Photo by Barry King:WireImage

“Damaged, volatile, darkly
handsome, dangerous, dead at 49… and one of the sweetest lost souls I’d ever
met,” says Clark. “This was the Christian
Brando I knew and the one that we bring back to life on stage in Wild Son. They are his words, and it is
his Hollywood story, about the kidnapping, the murder, and the explosive
relationship with his iconic father.”

Christian Brando, born in Los Angeles, California in 1958, was one of Marlon Brando’s eleven children—the only one he had as a product of his affair with actress Anna Kashfi, an Anglo-Indian actress from Wales. Marlon and Anna married in 1958 and divorced one year later.

Actor
John Mese (as Christian), clearly
portrays how much his parents hated each other and were hostile and abusive
toward one another. Christian was shuttled between them during their 12-year
custody battle. His mother’s uncontrollable temper, and drug and alcohol abuse
had a devastating affect on Christian. He was “raised in turmoil!”

John Mese

Marlon, a distant father, spent little time
with Christian and left his son in the care of nannies and servants. Christian
spent time between Hollywood and Tetiaroa, his father’s private island near
Tahiti.

When he was 13,
while his father was filming in France, Christian was kidnapped from school by
his mother, and left with a gang of hippie friends in Baja California, Mexico. When she refused to pay them the fee she
promised, they hid Christian. Marlon hired private detectives from an agency,
“The Investigators,” and the man sent to rescue Christian pulls him out of a
the tent he was living in while suffering from Bronchial Pneumonia. Numerous
Federales with M16’s waited to take him away. Anna was arrested near the
Mexican border after being pulled over for drunk driving and disorderly
behavior. The court then awarded Marlon sole custody.

Mese, in a riveting one-hour solo performance,
sits, or moves around the stage effectively while constantly sipping canned
beer. He does a sterling job of acting out Christian’s tragic story, his
rebellion and fractured relationship with his father—he felt he could never do
right for his Dad—and his fear of neighbor Jack Nicholson, who he says was
“weirder than me. Uncle Jack’s a great guy, but believe me, you don’t ever
want to mess with him!” He mentions several
other stars, Marlon’s friends, who revolved around his young life.

During his teen years Christian dropped out
of high school and began drinking and using LSD. He was an occasional actor,
but was not interested in being in the spotlight, especially since his father
made it clear that there was only room for one famous Brando. Christian ran
away from home to Washington State and moved in with family friends.

John Mese. Photo by Clark:Mese

On May 16, 1990, in the living room of his
father’s house in Beverly Hills, Christian, who admitted to being drunk at the
time, fatally shot Dag Drollet, his half-sister Cheyenne’s boyfriend, and
father of her soon-to-be-born child. Earlier that evening Christian and
Cheyenne had dinner at Musso & Frank Grill, where Cheyenne told him that
Drollet had been physically abusive toward her. He was incensed, saying that he
never intended to kill Drollet but just wanted to scare him, and claimed they
were fighting over the gun when it accidentally went off. He had just met
Drollet for the first time several hours before he shot him to death.

The family drama and trial were heavily publicized that year. Christian
pleaded guilty to manslaughter, was sentenced in 1991, and served 5 years in
prison. Said Christian, “There is not a single day that goes by where I
don’t think of Dag Drollet and wish that I could take it all back.”

John Mese

Writer
Champ Clark says, “For the most part,
that story was incredibly sad — tragic, really. As much as he loved
“Pop,” which he clearly did, their relationship was highly explosive
and, according to Christian, violently dysfunctional from early childhood. The
most poignant thing Christian ever told me was about the time, as an adult and
after he’d been released from prison, he’d invited both his parents to have
dinner with him.” Christian said, “not once in my entire life had I ever sat
down at the dinner table with the two of them together as a family. And I got
this crazy idea into my head that I could make that happen.” Marlon and
Anna both adamantly refused, both separately accusing Christian of being high
on drugs.

This is an exceptionally well-written 59-minute one-act piece based on personal interviews conducted by writer Champ Clark, and it is superbly performed and super-charged by John Mese. Highly recommended!